


under a very bad sign

by blancwene



Category: Vide Noir - Lord Huron (Album)
Genre: Aftermath of Possession, Drug Use, Gen, Mystery, Past Relationship(s), Science Fiction & Fantasy, Tarot, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-04-06 04:10:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blancwene/pseuds/blancwene
Summary: He’s damned if he’ll try to find meaning in a handful of cards, but he finds himself returning to them again and again as the days pass. Heartbreak in the middle, he guesses, crossed by a journey? A change? A star above, himself in confusion below. Death at the end. The other cards are mysteries to him.(The Narrator goes west, in search of the Emerald Star.)





	under a very bad sign

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertScribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/gifts).



“I’ll call you,” she says, looking back over her shoulder as she adjusts her grip on the cardboard box. “Once I’m settled out west.”

“The city?” he guesses.

Her face is hard to read in the dimming light. “No, farther.”

“What’s farther than the west coast?”

“The setting sun?” She shrugs, her hair a shadowy nimbus in the doorway.

He waves her on her way, and she passes out into the night.

Sometimes he lets her go. Sometimes he follows her onto the street, screaming curses and threats. Sometimes he leaves with her. Sometimes he stays.

It all blurs together in his mind—acceptance or denial, rage or inaction—until he can’t remember what was real and what was just a dream. But the message she leaves for him is always the same.

He pushes open the door to their room and finds her books and stones and candles missing, her half of the closet reduced to empty crooked hangers. Her toiletries are gone from the bathroom; her plants have vanished from the windowsill.

But her cards remain. Ten cards lay on the bed: six in a cross shape and four in a vertical line. He studies them, recognizing some from the numerous spreads he’s watched her lay down. The Star above—the upside-down Knight of Wands below. The High Priestess, with the Devil above her.

His first impulse is to sweep the cards from the quilt, dump the whole lousy deck in the trash where they belong. She knows he’s never believed in her witchy shit, and he’s damned if he’ll try to find meaning in a handful of cards.

But he pauses. He remembers her choosing one card every day, and occasionally laying down three. She said the cards were her meditation, a reflection for her own life. To leave ten cards for him…

He grabs his notebook and records the spread. A heart pierced by three swords, bisected by six swords pointing upright in an undulating sea. To the left, seven cups filled with various icons; to the right, three circles forming a triangle but reversed, the wrong way up. At the top the Star, bright and multifaceted in a green-tinged sky; at the bottom the upside-down Knight, all his movement and vitality negated by the change in direction.

Then along the right-hand side the High Priestess on her throne; the Devil with a path leading to nothingness; a woman stuck between eight cups, sitting upside down; and the grinning skull of Death. He stares at the last card the longest, and hears her voice in his head.

_“Death isn’t always the end—it can stand for change, or transformation. It’s nothing to fear.”_

He carefully numbers the cards in his drawing, then places them on the top of the deck and drops them all into his pocket. Then he crawls onto the quilt and falls into restless dreams.

 

* * *

 

He finds himself back at the beginning—their first meeting, their first words. A funeral of a friend of a friend, and he passes the time making banal conversation until he spots her in the corner. 

Her hair is a dark cloud of curls, her skin warm and brown against the flat black of her dress. She shuffles a deck, lays down a card, inspects it for a few minutes, then starts again. He drifts closer, and she glances up suddenly and skewers him with her gaze. Her eyes are mossy, olive green—forest eyes, he thinks. No, dryad eyes, he realizes. He approaches, and her lips curve in a smile.

“Cut the deck,” she orders.

He picks up the top half of cards, and places them facedown on the table. She places the bottom stack on top, and turns over the first card. A man stands in the center, dressed in dark blue with one knee bent, surrounded by an amorphous orange mountain. His body is tilted to the side, and he appears caught in the act of tossing the long staff in his right hand.

“The Knight of Wands,” she says, studying the card and then him. “Action, movement, excitement, adventure. Or,” she pauses, and turns the card around, “impulsiveness, haste, anger, and frustration. Which one are you?”

“Do I have to choose? It’s just a stupid card,” he snaps. But he continues to eye the deck in her hand. “Which card are you?” he finally asks her.

She starts flipping through the deck, then stops on one near the middle and turns it face-up on the table. A woman sits in a pool, the phases of the moon reflected around her. She holds a cup in her hand, and her hair extends around her like a cloak or a shroud.

“The Page of Cups,” she explains. “Or Princess, in some interpretations. So I’m blessed with creativity, inspiration, and intuition. Although perhaps a little too prone to getting caught up with inward matters.”

She pierces him again with those sharp green eyes, and it takes him a moment to realize that her hand is extended towards him. He takes it in his own, and feels the strength in her long slim fingers.

“I’m Astra Kinansi,” she says.

 

* * *

 

For a moment as he wakes, he can almost imagine that she’s never left. He feels her warmth along his side, her breath against his neck, her soft spirals of hair against his cheek. When he opens his eyes, though, he’s confronted with everything as he left it: a half-empty room, and himself lying awkward and alone on top of the quilt.

He reaches for his notebook and a pencil, and spends the morning sketching her. Sketching Astra. He draws the lines of her face—the upward tilt of her nose, the dramatic arch of her brow, the soft curve of her cheek. He tries to capture the glittering intelligence in her eyes, but finds himself erasing again and again until the paper wears thin.

He fingers the cards in his pocket, then flips back to the spread he drew yesterday. Heartbreak in the middle, he guesses, crossed by a journey? A change? A star above, himself in confusion below. Death at the end. The other cards are mysteries to him.

He studies the drawing for a long time, and finds himself returning to it again and again as the days pass. As he passes distractedly, inertly, through each hour at work, only to rush home and wait for a phone call that never comes. He’s not even sure if he can call it a home anymore—for every corner, every space only rubs in that she’s gone.

He lies in their room, smelling the ghosts of past candles and smudge sticks, and flips through her deck. Why didn’t she leave a note? Why choose a medium that she knew he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—decipher? He falls asleep and dreams of her graceful hands, shuffling endlessly. She moves too fast for him to catch a glimpse of any of the cards.

Then one day it’s too much. The spell snaps, or pauses, and he realizes that it’s been months. Months spent waiting for a phone call. Months spent waiting for a postcard, or a letter, or any sign that she made it and she remembers him. After months of inaction, he moves quickly. He sells his stuff, quits his job, and loads up his car.

He stops at a gas station outside town to buy a map, and the attendant peers at him curiously.

“Your headlights are out. Might wanna fix that.”

“I won’t need them where I’m going,” he answers.

He climbs back behind the wheel and drives off into the night.

 

* * *

 

He drives for hours on end, one-lane roads through desolate plains giving way to clogged metropolitan streets only to return to empty country roads again. He sleeps in his car for short stretches, tucked behind rest stops in darkened parking lots. The streetlights whip past, and the radio crackles and hisses, and he drives on.

He crosses mountains and prairies and valleys and more mountains and deserts, until he finally sees it in the distance. The city. He squints against the mass of lights and continues towards that electric hornet’s nest of activity.

He’s driving on a side street at the edge of the city, far off the main drag, and passes the entrance to a park. He glances over, but only sees scrubby plants and concrete where a riverbed once lay. He continues on, when his eyes are caught by flashing red and gold lights on the left. He slows and makes out LADY MOONBEAM - VISIONS GRANTED - ANSWERS GIVEN.

A moon flickers in one window, a river—or is it a waterfall?—in the other.

He remembers the seventh card, with the wise woman on a throne. He eases into a parking spot.

The door jangles as he lets himself inside, and he’s confronted with a long narrow hallway laid out like a waiting room. Vinyl chairs march along one wall, and he sinks down onto one near the door. He tries to study the room. A beaded curtain hangs opposite the farthest chair. The only decoration is a large print across from him, and he peers at it through the gloom.

A large green eye stares back at him—the iris glowing and viridian, the pupil a maw of black. Objects float in a circle around the eye, but he can’t make them out from this distance. He climbs back to his feet, and moves closer to the frame. He recognizes a dice, a flower, an anchor, and an owl mixed among other unknown symbols. At the bottom, a bold black typescript reads: THE BALANCER’S EYE.

The beads rustle to his left, and he turns jerkily around. A tall woman stands in the doorway; she studies him with a pair of dark, unreadable eyes. Her face is sharp and angular, strangely discordant with her floating, gauzy dress. The Fortune Teller nods abruptly, and ducks back behind the beads.

“Come,” he hears.

He brushes past the curtain and follows her into a small room. The space is almost entirely taken up by a table with a heavy black covering on top. She ushers him towards one of the chairs, and takes a seat across from him. She studies his face in the golden light.

“I’m looking—” he begins, but she cuts him off.

She pulls off the heavy cloth, revealing a crystal ball in the middle of the table. Although his mind immediately corrects itself—not quite a ball, though relatively spherical in shape, and perhaps not the clear white crystal he was expecting, for the stone glows almost purple before him.

“What do you see?” she prompts.

He looks at it closer, and sees:

_Astra poring over a book — The night sky, and a hand pointing upwards — A flickering candle — His hands, caked in blood — A card: a series of balls balancing on a board, but reversed, so the board hovers uselessly above while the balls plummet down — Astra sobbing — A green vial — EVERYONE’S A SINNER IN THE BALANCER’S EYE_

“Nothing,” he says flatly.

She eyes him speculatively. “You were given a message,” she states.

He reaches for the cards in his pocket. “My girl had these cards—and she left this spread.”

He hands them to her, but she draws back with a harsh sound in her throat. “I can’t touch those. Their energy—” She collects herself, and starts again. “Lay them out for me, as they were left.”

He carefully places them, his illustration so ingrained that the layout is burnt in his brain. The three of swords, crossed by the six of the same suit. The seven of cups on the left, the three of pentacles reversed on the right. The Star above, the reversed Knight of Wands below. Then on the right, moving from bottom to top, the High Priestess, the Devil, the eight of cups reversed, and Death. He taps the High Priestess slowly.

“This is you, isn’t it? Astra knew I’d come to you.”

The Fortune Teller looks at the spread, her face impassive.

“What was she trying to tell me?” he demands.

Her eyes flicker from card to card, then come to rest finally on his face. He finds it very hard to meet her gaze.

“This is a bad reading,” she eventually says. “You’ve been living in a dream world, boy.”

“What does it mean?” he hisses.

“You have to let her go,” she says. “You’ve been living with heartbreak, but if you follow this path, you won’t like where it leads.”

“Where?” he snaps.

“Disharmony, frustration, anger, addiction, aimless drifting,” the Fortune Teller bites out. “You keep where you’re headed, you’ll only find death at the end. You’re cursed, boy.”

“Bullshit,” he grinds out. “Bull. Shit. I’m looking for Astra. I need to find her!”

The Fortune Teller smiles. “Can’t find someone who don’t want to be found.”

She studies the Star again. “You gotta look into the past. Go to the park. Wait by the river.”

“What river?” he asks incredulously. “That’s just a concrete hole.”

“Ahh.” She sighs. “But there was a river once. And all of this was an alluvial plain. You look inside yourself, and you’ll find it.”

Despite his cajoling, she refuses to say anything more. He swipes the cards off the table, and shoves them back into his pocket. “Thanks for nothing,” he says, slapping a bill down on the table.

“Wait by the river,” she repeats as he pushes back through the beaded curtain.

He stomps out onto the street and heads towards his car, but the streetlamp by the park entrance draws him up short, considering.

A dark form beckons to him from an alleyway.

“Hey man. Wanna wander the universe? Got some Vide Noir—good shit, the real stuff.”

“Nah, don’t got time for that. Have to look inside my past, or some shit.”

The dark form nods. “You need Cosmic Ash then. Powdered stars. Best way to travel back in time.”

“Yeah? What’d you do, smoke it?”

“Got rolling paper too,” the form adds. “This’ll take you so far back.”

He pulls out a wad of cash, and hands it to the dealer. “Worth a try.”

 

* * *

 

He sits down in the park, by the dried-up riverbed, and lights the joint. “If this don’t work, I’ll be so pissed—” He breaks off into a coughing fit. The smoke reeks of burning ashes, and tastes like the dregs of a campfire. “Dead stars my ass,” he hacks.

He lies on his back and continues to breathe it in. A few stars twinkle above him, faint ghosts in the light-polluted sky. The moon hangs to his right, a thin crescent. He shuts his eyes.

He opens them to the sound of water rapidly flowing, and birds trilling, the sharp scent of lemongrass and the sweet, relaxing odor of lavender. He sits up, and finds his joint is gone. The stars blaze in the sky, a luminous tapestry, and the moon is round and full.

And the river has returned.

He staggers to his feet, and walks down to the shoreline. The water roils white over rapids, crashing over hazards and around rocks.

“How long—” he starts, but he trails off.

He fishes the cards out of his pocket, and tosses them, one by one, in the river. Some sink, but most float and drift downstream and out of sight. He sits by the river, and dips his hand in the cool water. He can see dark shapes flit past, and the birds continue to sing. He can also see—

a face.

He bends closer. Astra’s face looks up at him from below the surface of the water. Her hair floats lazily around her head, and her lips twitch into a gentle smile. She extends a hand up towards his own.

He reaches his hand down and

falls

s  
i  
d  
e  
w  
a  
y  
s

spɹɐʍʞɔɐq uǝɥʇ

through the water, the dark rushing round him till he lands—

on his back, on a blanket, in a field. He looks up and sees the stars in different positions, and the moon is gone. The air smells of fresh-cut grass.

Astra’s arm cuts across his chest, and he follows her finger up and to the left. 

“See that one? That’s Vega. It’s the fifth brightest star in the sky. It’s one of the stars that make up Lyra, the Harp.” She grabs his hand, and traces the shape.

“Which one’s your favorite?” he asks.

“Oh,” she says, shifting to the right. “That fainter one, there. That’s Beta Librae, or Zubeneschamali. It’s the brightest star in Libra, but it was originally part of Scorpius. In Arabic it was _al-zubānā al-šamāliyy_ , the northern claw. Eratosthenes said it was brighter than Antares.”

“Pretty dim now,” he says.

“Earlier observers also described it as a green star,” she continues. “Do you think stars can change?”

“I know they’re born and they die.”

“No.” She shakes her head, and raises his hand again to traces the Scales and the Scorpion. “Do you ever wonder if stars could fall and forget what they were? Maybe Beta Librae was a bright green star, but another star had to take its place.”

“What are you saying?” he asks, confused.

“People talk about their past life as Cleopatra. Well, why not a star? Why shouldn’t a star live and die and be reborn, just the same as all other life?”

“You don’t seriously believe that a star could fall or die and become something else,” he scoffs. “That’s straight up Narnia shit.”

She rolls away and presents him with her back. “I thought it was more some Diana Wynne Jones shit.”

“Science, Astra,” he says helplessly. “We don’t need mumbo jumbo if it’s already been explained by science.”

She stands and starts to walk away. “One day the old Beta Librae will come back, and you’ll see.”

“Oh, I await the return of the emerald star,” he mocks. He closes his eyes.

And time passes.

And the sun rises.

He wakes to find himself flat on his back by the riverside, the sun blaring painfully down in his eyes. The grassy field is gone. The blanket is gone.

He lies amid a ring of hummingbird sage, the rosy-lilac flowers brushing his face and the fruity scent filling his nostrils.

 

* * *

 

He heads back to his car, and lights another joint. He chokes down the foul-smelling smoke, and stretches out as much as he can on the backseat, his knees bent and his feet jammed against the door panel.

He blinks, and now he’s in the driver’s seat, the window partway down and the A/C cranked up as high as it will go. He watches Astra lock up the bookstore ( _Underground Books—Used—Rare—Antiquarian_ ), then dash across the street and fumble for the door handle. She falls into the passenger seat, her arms juggling a heavy stack of old leather-bound books.

“I thought the difference between a library and a bookstore was that a bookstore made you pay for anything you took home,” he says, pulling away from the curb.

“I always put them back in the morning,” she says innocently.

“What would you do if someone ever bought one?”

“Follow them home and steal it back,” she said promptly.

He eases off the clutch, and they idle at the red light. Her head is bent over one of the books, and he leans over to read the spine.

“ _The Practice of Magical Evocation_? Gods, Astra, you aiming to summon the Ender or something?”

She snaps the book shut and looks up at him, her face pinched. “Don’t even joke about that.”

The light turns green, and he shifts back into gear. “Aw, baby, everyone says—”

“It’s not funny. Names have power, no matter how you use them.”

He shrugs. “If you’re looking for a soporific, I know something that works every time.”

“Oh yes?” she asks.

He leans over and nuzzles her neck. She squirms, laughing, and pushes him away.

“Best sleeping aid I know,” he says, leaning over again.

“Not now! Keep your eyes on the road.”

“Baby, the car has airbags. Should have airbags.”

“I have absolutely no desire to test whether your airbags work,” she laughs, shoving him back.

His head bounces against the headrest, and his eyes snap open—

back in the present, scrunched up on the backseat with a horrible crick in his neck.

He moves his car to the back corner of a deserted parking lot, and lights another, and another, and another. The memories become shorter and shorter: Astra peeling an apple. Astra flipping through his sketchbook. Astra laying down those damn cards. Astra’s face in the moonlight. Each time he slams back to the present more abruptly, until his final glimpse of the past is just a few seconds of himself seated, Astra leaning over him, her cool hand against his forehead.

“No fever,” she says. Her eyes are unbearably sad.

He wakes to find that he’s out of Cosmic Ash and his head aches. He rolls down the window and sucks in a gasping breath of air.

 _“So,”_ he can hear the Fortune Teller say, _“what did you learn?”_

Not a goddamn thing he didn’t already know. They were happy—they were making plans—and then she left. Something tugs at the back of his mind, though, like an itchy scab, and he prods it cautiously.

 _“You were happy,”_ a voice whispers. _“But was she?”_

Yes. Of course.

_“Then why did she leave?”_

He starts up the car—that’s what he came here to find, he thinks quellingly—and drives off.

 

* * *

 

He finds himself driving aimlessly through the city, down to the ocean then back on the congested main streets and finally out to the eastern edge of the city again. He crawls up and down that side street, with the abandoned park and Lady Moonbeam’s neon signs. He shuts off the engine and climbs out onto the sidewalk. The red moon winks, blinding then absent, and the golden water flashes and ripples. He shoves his way inside, and the door chimes behind him. He heads straight for the beaded curtain and pushes his way inside.

The Fortune Teller looks up, a frown on her narrow face.

“That was a waste of time. Wait by the river? All I saw was stuff I already knew.”

“And you saw why she left?”

“No!” he explodes. “Why make me relive all that again, if it still doesn’t explain why she’s gone?”

She nods, and her lashes drop down, veiling her eyes. He sinks into the chair across from her.

“What do you see in the crystal ball?” he asks accusingly.

Her lids flicker. She stares at the surface of the ball of a long time. Finally, she speaks.

“You’ve got a hole in your mind. A gap. Skips over it like a scratch on a record.” She glances up at him. “Someone had good intentions, and they made you forget.”

“I don’t—” he says, but again he can feel it, like a scab on a wound. He shies away from picking at it, and looks back at her. “Was it Astra?”

“She meant well,” the Fortune Teller repeats. “Now you should go home. Go back east.”

“I can’t,” he insists. “My job—my car—I don’t have anything left.”

She sniffs, and her brow wrinkles. “You been smoking Cosmic Ash, boy?”

“You said to look into the past,” he says defensively. “The dealer said—”

“Dealer’ll say anything to make a sale. You got enough sight to see without that.” She studies him closely. “Your girl: what’s her name?”

“Astra Kinansi.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I don’t mean the name she chose. Her ancient name.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Unless you’re talking about something like the End—”

The Fortune Teller shushes him, and he can see fear in her dark eyes. “Don’t name it. Names have power.”

“That’s what Astra said.”

She tosses the dark cloth over the crystal ball and stands. “If you’re sure you want to find her, you’ll need her true name. And you won’t find her in the past, so stop smoking that shit.”

“Where should I look for her?” he asks, getting to his feet.

She grabs his hands, and her grip is like steel. He winces, and she peers deep in his eyes.

“Beyond, boy. Just don’t leave your body behind.”

 

* * *

 

He leaves the Fortune Teller and walks mindlessly, turning off one street onto another at random. The sky gradually darkens, and he smells salt in the air. He pauses at one corner and looks out over the hurried mass of the city and the black sea beyond. The waves swell and rise to meet the gathering night.

He turns northward, and the rain begins to fall. He passes a large bank of windows and sees his face reflected back at him: hair a mess, cheeks gaunt, eyes bruised and shadowed. The next pane shows him Astra, her back turned and her head bent. He sees himself again, still and unmoving in the back of his car; the Fortune Teller and her crystal ball; a vast, hazy, shapeless form. He pulls his collar up and hurries on.

He can spot his car in the distance when a hand reaches out to him from an alley. “How was the Cosmic Ash? Take you way back?”

He squints at the dark form of the dealer. “Yeah, saw a bit. Need to go beyond now.”

“Vide Noir, man.” A green vial appears in the outstretched hand. “Takes you on a trip through time and space.”

“Yeah? How much, then?” He winces at the price, and digs through his pockets. He exchanges the last of his cash for the small vial, and studies it closely. Its facets gleam like malachite in the dim light.

“How much do I take?” he asks, turning back to the dealer in the shadows.

“Trial and error, man. Enough to get moving, but too much will blackbrain you.”

“Thanks,” he says weakly.

He slips it in his pocket, and closes the distance to the car. He eases into the driver’s seat and starts up the engine, Lady Moonbeam’s signs flashing at him through the windshield. He heads towards the sea.

Minutes later, he pulls into a cliffside lot and turns the ignition off. Clambering over the gearstick into the backseat, he takes the vial from his pocket. He uncaps the top, and finds a dropper inside.

“Five drops? Ten drops?” He shakes his head. “I don’t have the foggiest. I’ll try twenty.”

He counts out twenty drops on his tongue, and sinks back against the seat. The liquid tastes of licorice, and something sharp and metallic. “Already better than Cosmic Ash,” he murmurs. His eyes close.

Suddenly he’s shooting up, past the clouds into the twinkling night sky, growing in speed until he’s past Earth’s atmosphere and out into the black void of space. He stills, seeing the mottled green and blue globe below and the silvery moon above him, then laughs and continues on.

He flies past all manner of worlds: red dusty dead ones; crackling icy ones; barren rocky ones; rippling blue watery ones; and more he cannot even find the words to describe. He careens recklessly through asteroid belts and rides on the tail of a comet, bright and cold. He rockets on.

And everywhere he sees doors—groups of doors clustered together, or a single door standing alone in the emptiness of space. He peeks through one at an unfamiliar scene—a man clawing his way out of an unmarked grave—and quickly shuts it. He gives the other doors he passes a wide berth, and flies on.

He soars through nebulae, circles endless other suns. He realizes he has lost his bearings, and lands on a deserted planetoid to figure out where he is.

But the stars are all strange, and no matter where he looks, he doesn’t recognize a single landmark. He lies down by a pool and sinks his fingers into the alien sod.

Footsteps approach, and he turns his head to see a silvery light approaching. He struggles to sit up, but all he can make out is a shape. Then the light dims, or his vision clears, and all he can see is Astra.

“You’re here?”

She shakes her head, and he turns back to face the pool. “Of course you’re not. This is all in my head.”

She kneels before him, and reaches out a hand to stroke his cheek. She smiles. Then she draws back her hand and slaps him, hard. He recoils away.

“What was that for?” he yelps.

Her features blur, then reform into the harsh face of the Fortune Teller. “What did I tell you?” She reaches into the air between them, and yanks roughly. He feels a tug at his chest, and looks down to see a cord, barely visible, stretching from his breastbone to her fist and then out into the void.

“You’re tethered,” she explains. “Your body’s still in the backseat of your car.”

He pulls the cord out of her grasp and studies it. “Did you follow me here?”

“I serve the Balancer in all things,” she says.

She flickers, and Astra’s soft brown face looms over him again. “I wanted to keep you safe.”

“You left me!” He scoots back a few steps, avoiding her eyes. “I’ve been looking for you.”

She follows him forward, and presses her lips against the corner of his mouth. He turns his head to deepen the kiss, but she vanishes.

He staggers to his feet, looking all around, but she’s gone.

“Follow the emerald star,” she whispers in his ear.

Then he feels a shove on his back and he’s tumbling end over end, back the way he came. He hurls past planets and stars and galaxies so fast that his eyes tear and sting. He shuts them, and moments later draws in a sputtering, watery breath as he crashes into the freezing ocean.

His eyes snap open in his car, and he’s drenched to the skin.

 

* * *

 

He staggers out of the car and stumbles down the cliffside path to the beach. He tries to shake the water out of his clothes, then gives up and lies down on the pebbly sand. He drapes an arm over his eyes and focuses on catching his breath. He hadn’t even begun to explore when Dream-Astra or whatever-she-was sent him crashing back to Earth.

He lowers his arm and peers up into the brightening sky. It’s too close to the city, and too close to dawn, though, for him to make out any of the stars. And besides, none of them look green.

He rolls over onto his side, and fishes the vial out of the opposite pocket. It looks barely touched, the liquid level still close to the top. He unscrews the dropper top and hurls it into the sea.

“Why did she leave me, and where has she gone?” He repeats it again and again like a mantra, psyching himself to enter the void again. “Why did she leave me, and where has she gone?”

He gets to his feet and pours the whole vial down his throat. It burns as it goes down.

Then he’s flying, far faster than before, up and out and beyond. Fast as light, then faster, he shoots past celestial objects in an instant. He tries to turn, to steer, but finds that nothing alters his course. He wraps his arms around himself, and shivering, rushes on.

He soars on, even more quickly, and the cord at his chest grows thin and faint. Then he slams to a halt. He’s floating in nothingness, but as he turns he catches a hint of red to his left. He moves towards it.

It’s a door, huge and crimson, with a bleached animal skull where the knocker would be. He tries to shy back, but finds he can only move in one direction. He glides forward, and reaches for the doorknob.

He opens the door and sees himself inside, high on Rainbow and lolling on the couch back home. Then abruptly, he’s inside his past self, seeing through his own eyes. He throws out a hand for balance, but his body doesn’t respond.

So: observer only.

He takes another hit of Rainbow and tilts his head to look at Astra’s books on the side table. Boredom beckons, and he stretches out a hand for one of them.

“Magical evocation,” he reads from the title page. A part of him is wailing and screaming, but he continues to flip through the pages, unaware.

“To summon a powerful being,” he reads, giggling. He takes another hit. His eyes fix on the warning at the top of the page (“Unlike other spells within this book, _potentia excitandus_ does not allow you to specify who you are summoning, so use only with the greatest precautions”), but it’s too late: he can feel his stupid, wasted mouth sounding out the unfamiliar words on the page.

He gets to the end of the invocation, and laughs. “Bullshit gibberish,” he slurs. He reaches for the pipe.

But his older self, his present self, is watching wordlessly as a black hulk materializes in the corner. It’s hard to judge its size, for it seems to absorb all the light in the room. He can catch the glimmer of yellow eyes and innumerable needle-sharp teeth.

Even his drugged past self begins to notice, and sits up in alarm. “What the—” he starts, then breaks into a coughing fit.

The apparition says his name. He nods helplessly.

“YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME,” it continues. Its voice is deep and somehow also wet. He shivers and shrugs.

It continues to grow and spread, until it seems to envelop the whole room.

“YOU’LL DO.”

Then it reaches out—arms? hands?—and grabs him by the throat. He reaches up, choking, but can’t loosen its grip. His eyes roll back.

He had thought the Ender simply a reaper of souls. What the urban legends and childhood cautionary tales failed to make real to him, though, is that the Ender only has one task. It ends—hope, innocence, life itself. And riding helpless under the Ender’s power, his hands hold the knife, his teeth bite into fur and skin. He finds the sensations (feel, taste, smell) overpowering, but even more haunting is the final expression of each of the Ender’s victims. No peaceful slipping into sleep for those the Ender choses; they fight it to the end, writhing and shrieking.

Time passes. He has no way of judging its length, for it feels endless. He catches snatches of memories, of images (blood, so much blood) but most is a blur.

He comes to on the floor of the room, his shoes missing and his clothes in shreds. His mouth tastes of iron. His arms, all the way up to the armpits, are coated in blood.

He looks up at the ceiling, and three jagged words are carved in the plaster above him: RETURNED FOR NOW.

He blinks, and he’s screaming himself awake, his throat raw. He flails and kicks, and feels someone pressing him down into the bed. He recognizes Astra’s hands trying to restrain his own, and Astra’s weight laying heavy on top of him. “You’re home! You’re safe!” she yells in his ear.

He stills, and she slides off to the side. He glances at the clock and groans.

“That’s what—two hours of sleep before a nightmare? A new record.”

Her voice is quiet, and he has to roll over to catch what she says. “What if I could make you forget?”

“Could you do that?”

“I’ll look through my books.” She stands, and leaves the room. He hears her rummaging through the kitchen, and a few minutes later the kettle whistles. She comes back in and hands him a steaming mug.

He takes a sip, and swallows it gingerly. The taste is strong and earthy, and slightly pumpkiny. He grimaces. “Can’t I have some coffee?”

“Not yet.” She smiles awkwardly. He turns to face the window, and can feel her hands stroking his hair.

After a few moments, she stops. He hears the crackle of a match. He smells the astringent, herbal scent of another smudge stick.

“I won’t let it take you again,” she promises.

He blinks, and Astra’s burning red incense in a bowl. The fragrance is warm and musky, but also reminiscent of burning rubber. She adds some herbs to a mortar and starts grinding them.

“I’m using rosemary, rue, thyme, and angelica, since they work well for banishing. Once they’re crushed, I’ll add the lava salt.”

He watches the incense burn all the way down. She pours the contents of the mortar into the bowl, and combines them together: gray ash, green herbs, and black salt. She stands and heads out the front door, and he follows.

She hands him the bowl. “Take some in your hand, and blow it away.”

He reaches in and grabs a handful. The mixture threatens to spill out of his palm, and he squeezes his fist tightly closed. “Should I say anything?”

Astra looks thoughtful. “You don’t have to. Just focus on what you want to cast out.”

He focuses not on the memories—even when he focuses, that past seems murky and unclear—but on the feelings he struggles with every night. Fear, apprehension, guilt, pain. He uncurls his fingers, and takes a deep breath.

The ashes drift past on the wind. His mind skips, or resets. 

He looks down to find traces of crushed leaves clinging to his palm. He studies it, knowing there’s a reason why his hand smells of smoke and incense, but unable to remember why. He wipes his hand on his pants, grimacing.

“I need a drink,” he says, passing her back the bowl. “This stuff reeks.”

He blinks, and he’s sitting in a darkened bar. He digs through his jacket pocket, searching for his wallet, when his fingers close on a little bag. He pulls it out and peers at it.

It’s made of cotton or muslin, closed by a drawstring, maybe two inches across and three or four inches tall. He unties the string and tips the contents out into his hand. It smells green and citrusy, and he separates out green hairy stems from tiny white flowers from slivers of silvery bark.

One of his friends looks over and laughs. “Astra giving you love charms or something?” He elbows the others, and they collapse into drunken amusement.

“It’s not a love charm,” he protests. “It’s—”

He can hear Astra’s voice in his head, as she cuts snippets from her potted herbs on the windowsill. _“These are all good for protection: alyssum, boneset, nettle. Birch bark, too, if I can find some. Or bergamot.”_

He stands up, and walks over to the trash. “It’s garbage,” he says quickly, dumping everything in. He shakes his hands clean. “Just her witchy crap. And I don’t need it.”

He blinks, and he’s tripping over a line of salt in the doorway. “Gods, Astra, quit it with the mystical shit!” He sweeps his arm along the dresser and sends a pile of shiny black crystals crashing to the floor. “It’s like a hoarder witch lives here.”

Astra looks up from the cards she’s laid out on the bed. “Don’t you remember? They’re for your protection.”

“Not that bullshit,” he snaps. “Why can’t you be normal for once?”

She collects her cards in one hand, and quietly leaves the room. He starts to follow after her, but he stumbles over one of the crystals and kicks it into the wall.

“What the hell are you even protecting me from?”

He blinks, and he’s stretched out on the couch, staring at the wall. Astra hovers in the doorway, a cardboard box in her arms. She looks at him anxiously. “Don’t forget to light the black candles in every window.”

He grunts.

“I’ll call you,” she says. “Once I’m settled out west.”

“Don’t bother.” He crosses his arms against his chest. “Gods, sometimes I wish you were dead.”

He blinks, and he’s outside the red door again in the blank void. He covers his face with his hands and sobs.

 

* * *

 

He drifts, lost in time and space. The stars seem trillions of miles away, and all he can see is black. Black emptiness, black vacuum, black void. Is this what it means to be blackbrained? he wonders. So far out in the nothingness that you haven’t a hope of finding your way back?

Last time he had Dream-Astra. This time he’ll have no one: the Fortune Teller will have cut her losses, and Astra will have fucked off to do impossible things. There aren’t any emerald stars left. He’s almost three thousand years too late.

He tucks his knees to his chest and slowly rotates, a human cannonball stuck in its lonely little orbit.

If he closes his eyes, he can picture the sky again from that long ago summer’s night. He follows Astra’s finger as she points out Aquila and Cygnus and Lyra. The Eagle and the Swan and the Harp. How Altair and Deneb and Vega from each of those constellations made up the Summer Triangle.

Then right, to the Scorpion and the Scales. How the top star in Libra was once dazzling bright, brighter than Antares or even two corners of the Triangle.

“Beta Librae,” he whispers. “The Emerald Star.”

He hears a tinkling sound, like tiny wind chimes, and stops his helpless rotation. He opens his eyes, and sees a blinding green light approaching. He looks away, but still he can feel it coming closer and closer. It stops before him and seems to shrink to a human-sized shape. He narrows his eyes, the shape still unfocused.

It’s a woman, holding a light. No, he corrects—she _is_ the light. He can’t make out her features, for everything is masked by her green glow. He tries not to cower away.

“You remembered my name,” she says.

Then she swoops closer, and it’s Astra’s hands touching his, Astra’s lips quirked in a smile. He tries to look in her eyes, but has to quickly glance away—for they still blaze with green fire, like burning copper.

“You left me,” he whines.

She cocks her head. “You didn’t want to come. You wished I was dead.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “I’ve come to take you home.”

“I am home,” she says gently. “You and I were meant for different things.”

“I didn’t mean to summon it!”

“I know,” she says. “But you sealed your fate. I couldn’t accept that at first, and tried to protect you.”

“I didn’t understand—”

“No. And neither did I. But now you’ll have to follow your own path.”

She draws back, and he squints at the full force of her brilliance.

“I can offer you a choice,” she says. “I can send you back to the beginning.”

“To change it?” he asks eagerly. “To make it right?”

“Oh, no. Truths once known never come unknown.”

“Then what’s the point? To live it all again, knowing how it will end the whole time? Fuck that. What’s the other option?”

“You’re blackbrained,” she says regretfully. “You’ve taken too much Vide Noir to return to your body, and your tether is fading. I can sever the tie for you.”

“Then I can come with you?”

“I’m the Star,” she explains. “You’re the Knight of Wands. You’d never be happy in one place.”

“So you’re leaving me again?” he explodes furiously. “Did you ever love me?”

“Did you?”

She waits patiently, and he eventually hangs his head in defeat. “Cut the cord. I’ll make my own way, then.”

She snaps her fingers, and the tug at his chest ceases. He feels a burning kiss on his right cheek, then his left, and her hands squeeze his.

“Safe travels,” she offers as a benediction. Then the chimes sound, and she’s gone.

He pulls himself up straight, and stares into the void. A distant star flashes briefly, and he sighs.

The universe stretches before him. He picks a direction and sets off into the blackness.

**Author's Note:**

> Astra is using Grace Duong’s Mystic Mondays Tarot deck. If you’re interested in what they look like, here is each of the cards mentioned:
> 
>  
> 
> [Knight of Wands](https://imgur.com/4GC57HH)  
> [Page of Cups](https://imgur.com/XHCDOk6)
> 
>  
> 
> [Three of Swords](https://imgur.com/1mbPjJf)  
> [Six of Swords](https://imgur.com/QEhpfit)  
> [Seven of Cups](https://imgur.com/wjcI8IX)  
> [Three of Pentacles (reversed)](https://imgur.com/Qcr8ygL)  
> [The Star](https://imgur.com/uHEJJHw)  
> [Knight of Wands (reversed)](https://imgur.com/x4b5PfD)  
> [The High Priestess](https://imgur.com/NkdAwyz)  
> [The Devil](https://imgur.com/mYngzbg)  
> [Eight of Cups (reversed)](https://imgur.com/Hvs6xig)  
> [Death](https://imgur.com/NTS3sZq)
> 
>  
> 
> [Temperance (reversed)](https://imgur.com/RRlXibs)
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks to El for the very thoughtful edits, and S. for being my sounding board.


End file.
